30,000 On the Hoof (32 page)

"Barbara, you women couldn't see the devil himself if he had on a uniform... Now you take my word for it until you see for yourself... Let's slip one over on this fellow, as the saying goes here. You go to the movies with him, but come home pronto. Be sweet to the lady-killer. Give him a dose of his own medicine. Tell him you are afraid your Dad will go broke hanging on to his cattle herd. Tell him if he'll only buy it you'll be very--very nice to him."

"Logan Huett!" burst out Lucinda, red in the face. "Dad, I'm surprised," added Barbara, hotly.

"You'll be a damn sight more surprised if you do as I ask," declared Logan, bluntly.

"I'll do it and I'll--I'll mean it," returned Barbara, spiritedly. "I think you're suspicious, unjust, old-fashioned. I think you're--"

"Never mind what I am," interrupted Logan, in the first stern tone he had ever used to her. "I know what you mean by being nice. You'd be yourself.

Mitchell will take it another way. But after to-night you are never to go anywhere with him again, or ask him in here if he calls, or lay yourself open to any occasion with him alone. Do you understand me, young lady?"

"I--I couldn't help it."

"You'll obey me?"

"Yes, Father."

That ended the discussion, though not the confusion and resentment Logan's women-folk felt. As for Logan, he had taken pains to find out all about Mitchell, and he felt not only justified, but quite elated. He attended that motion-picture, to his regret. The scenes of marching soldiers and embarking marines, the long lines of moving artillery, the endless streams of trucks, the soldiers, miserable and begrimed in muddy trenches, the tanks belching fire, and the cannons puffing smoke, the great holes blown in the ground by bursting shells--all these scenes purported to have actually been filmed at the front made Logan sick and dazed.

"So that's war!" he muttered, jostling through the noisy crowd emerging into the street. "And I sent my sons into that... Good God! I reckoned they'd have a chance. Man to man, with rifles, behind trees and rocks, where the sharp eye and crack shot would prove who was best! But that--God Almighty--what would you call that?"

Logan went home to find Lucinda out, as usual. He lighted the lamp and building a fire in the open fireplace, he composed himself to his pipe when Barbara entered quickly. Her beautiful face was white instead of pale, and her great eyes appeared to flare lightnings.

"Hello, Bab. Glad you got home so early. What upset you?"

"Dad, I don't know which was the worse, Mr. Mitchell or that ghastly motion-picture," she replied, with suppressed agitation.

"Humph. That picture was pretty damn bad. It made me sick."

Barbara threw off her coat and hat, and stood in the open door of her room, facing Logan. He had never seen her as she was now, and he felt a surge of elation.

"Dad, I apologize," she said, her dark eyes on him. "You were right about Mitchell. I started out to be very sweet and nice, as I had bragged to you I'd be... I'm afraid I overdid it. On the way home, just now, he--he... Well, I'd have been happier and safer With Jack Campbell... But I got away from your lady-killer without destroying his illusion that he'd made an easy conquest of the simple little country-jake. Which I was!"

"Ha! ha! Well, I'll be doggoned... I hope he didn't insult you, Bab. It takes me off my feed for weeks to kill a man."

"Hush, Dad. He insulted me, but he didn't guess that. I reckon he thinks it his charming, masterly way with women."

"Humph. I'm not so stuck on that--. Did Mitchell mention cattle?"

"He did. He'll send for you to-morrow. And he'll buy. It's up to you now, Dad. I'll never let him come near me again."

Logan sat up, smoking, and waiting for Lucinda to come in. He would sell his thirty thousand head. Then what? Wait for the boys to come home. He would miss the brown game trails and the lovely coloured woods this fall.

What strange inexplicable creatures women were! But wonderful, good, faithful--most of them! And men? He was not learning so much to make him proud of his sex these days. War, greed, lust--they seemed to go together.

Next morning Logan had a stroke of good fortune in the shape of an offer from a Chicago firm, through its local buyer who had arrived in Flagg, of twenty-five dollars a head for his cattle, delivered at the company's cost at the railroad. When, therefore, Logan received a verbal message to call upon the Government official he felt pretty self-assured. He would get more than twenty-five, and anything more he felt was a windfall.

Mitchell was cool, calculating, business-like when Logan entered his presence. Logan's last vestige of respect fled before this smooth, mask-faced man who had only the night before insulted his daughter. Logan sensed something he had never encountered before in his deals with men, and it baffled him. But he divined what an infinitesimal figure he cut in the machinations of this suave gentleman. It affected Logan exceedingly.

"Morning, Huett. I hear Blair made you an offer."

"Yep. He came across pretty good."

"Twenty-five a head and expenses of delivery. He told me Al Doyle had prompted the offer and that you'd accept."

"Wal, that was fine of Al. But I couldn't think of it."

"No, you wouldn't," retorted Mitchell tartly. "What do you want this morning?"

Logan conceived the idea that Mitchell really did not care what the cattle cost, once he made up his mind to buy. It was an unusual deduction for Logan to make, and he shrewdly thought he would test it out by asking a high figure from which he could come down considerably and still make a big deal.

"I want expense for the drive and full charge of it. Thirty-five dollars a head, paid on delivery at the railroad--in cash."

"In cash?" repeated Mitchell in amazement.

"Yes, in cash. I might have to wait on a bank draft for so much money.

It'll take two weeks or more to drive. That'd give you plenty of time to get the cash."

Mitchell waved a deprecatory hand, which meant that it was no matter of importance how the debt was paid. But before he averted his eyes, Logan caught a fleeting glimpse of an extraordinarily steely flash. Also the man crushed a piece of paper that he held in his hand. These evidences of feeling puzzled Logan until Mitchell turned with a light on his face.

Then Logan imagined the singular reaction had to do with Barbara.

"Expenses and management of delivery okay," said Mitchell, blandly. "But thirty-five dollars is too high. I can't pay it."

They argued. Logan certainly felt the buyer's flinty edge, yet he did not seem to grasp sincerity. Logan distrusted his own deductions. He had made too many blunders. Here he meant to hold out a little, then capitulate for anything above twenty-five.

"Twenty-eight dollars on the hoof!" launched Mitchell, out of a doubtful sky.

Logan shook at the tigerish leap of hot blood. After all his stern resistance and the flex and reflex of prices, to call so soon was balm to his wounded pride, gratification to his greed.

"Sold!" he boomed, and extended a great horny hand. But the army official was writing and appeared not to notice the gesture.

"Logan Huett. Flagg, Arizona. Thirty thousand on the hoof. Twenty-eight dollars a head. Pay in cash on delivery. Expense to drive extra," he droned crisply, while he wrote rapidly. He shoved the paper back and his sleek head came erect with a hawk-like swiftness. "Huett, the deal is on.

Drive under your personal supervision. Get a move on!"

At high noon, five days later, Huett stood on an elevated part of the rim at the confluence of Turkey and Sycamore Canyons.

The resonant yells of cowboys floated up to his tingling ears; the weird, wild cries of Indians whipped back in echo from wall to wall.

"Sight of your life, old-timer!" called Doyle, hoarsely in Huett's ear.

"It is, Al, and thirty-three years' wait makes it sweeter."

Far as eye could see, across the floor of Turkey Canyon and up its six-mile length, spread a living, restless mosaic of cattle. The yells that pealed from cowboy to cowboy and Indian to Indian were the relays down to Huett. His answering shout was to start the drive. The cowboys had taken three days moving the cattle in Turkey over to Sycamore.

Huett's arrival on the rim was the signal that Lee Doyle and Jess Smith waited for.

"Blow your horn, Gabriel," said Al, with gusto.

Huett began to draw in breath, to fill his wide lungs and expand his deep chest; and when he was full to bursting, he expelled it all in one stupendous stentorian explosion. "Waahoo-oo!"

Abe's old hunting-call, augmented to grand volume by Huett's passion, boomed across the canyon and banged back. All the hope and failure, the ambition and discouragement, the endless toil and unceasing trouble, all Huett's life as a cattleman, the terrible years at last crowned with victory, success, wealth, pealed out in that long, wonderful yell. Before echoes ceased the Indians below on each side of the herd relayed the signal one to another up the canyon until their voices were lost in the distance. The head of that magnificent herd was out of sight round the bend, probably far beyond the cabin.

Huett watched in silence. He could hear his heart beating. At last, far up the canyon, the mass of cattle began to move. Like a turgid current of stream, congested by tossing driftwood and roots of stumps, the movement came on down slowly through the herd until all the cattle were on the move.

"The drive's on, old timer," shouted Al, waving his sombrero. "Good-bye, old bulls and long-horns--good-bye to Sycamore."

Huett lingered. The herd moved at a slow walk, gradually going faster as the forward mass broke into free action. The old cattleman waved to them a farewell to Sycamore. There was a lump in his throat. His eyes grew dim so that the red and white and black chequered carpet of cows and steers blurred in his sight. This was the most exceedingly full, the greatest moment of Logan Huett's life.

"Wal--Al, they're off," he said, in husky accents. "My cup is almost full... If only my sons could see!"

They left the rim, climbed over the rough ledges to the open woods, and out to the road and the waiting car. Huett had the driver run the six miles up to Long Valley, and stop at the forks of the road, where the branch led down to his ranch. But instead of going down to a vantage-point on the wall below, Huett, this time alone, climbed the steep bluff and got out on the edge above his cabin. He gazed, and an irresistible yell escaped his panting lips.

His cabin appeared to be a little moss-roofed, green-logged island in a river of many colours and jostling waves and milling eddies. The narrow construction of the canyon here was packed solidly with wagging, bawling cattle. "Whoopee!... Ki-yi-ki-yi!" rang up the piercing yells a the cowboys. Their echoes mingled with the sing-song chant of the Navajo riders. The trample of thousands of hoofs made a low, subdued roar. Dust rose in puffs and patches, rolling back on the light breeze to merge into a cloud that obscured the wide mass of the herd below.

This scene was intimate and beautiful. Huett could smell the cattle, the manure, the dust, the hoof-ploughed earth of his corn and alfalfa fields.

What of his great patch of potatoes? He could see the burly bulls, the wide-horned cows, the thick-necked steers, the yearlings and heifers, crowding along the corrals, obliterating the brook, colouring the bench, surrounding the cabin, passing on under the pines. Huett thought he revelled in bliss, but there was a pang in his breast. His cattle were going. Something was passing. It seemed almost like the end of life.

Soon the vast volume of animals down around the corner in the wide stretch from wall to wall by their very momentum forced those ahead in the constricted neck of the canyon into a lumbering gallop. And then the trample grew deafening, the dust rose to hide the motley stream. Huett stood a while longer above the ranch he could not see and the cattle that thundered by under a yellow pall. Then he retraced his steps back down off the bluff and out to the road where Doyle and the driver awaited him.

"Makes me think of the old buffalo days," said AL "Hope that run doesn't develop into a stampede."

"Nothing to--worry us," panted Huett. "They're crowding--through that narrow neck... She opens out soon. Before sunset they'll be--up on the range."

They drove up to the end of Long Valley, and leaving the road, bumped and swayed over rough going through the woods until compelled to stop. Then they dismounted and walked. Two chuck-wagons, widely separated, awaited the drivers at the point where the open range sent a grey wedge into the woods. Huett and Doyle were not far ahead of the vanguard of the herd.

For three hours Huett sat on a chuck-wagon seat, watching his cattle flow like a magic colourful river out of the forest and spread across the wide corner of range. Those hours might have been minutes.

Before sunset the entire herd was up on the level and halted for the night. Cowboys came swinging in on dust-caked horses. Soon Lee, Bill, Jack Ray, Con Sullivan, and other drivers rode up to pay their happy respect to the cattleman. They were all as black as the nigger Johnson, but not so shiny of face.

"Mr. Huett--Dad," called Lee, cheerfully, as with a scarf he wiped his begrimed face to show it red and wet, "it was easy as duck-soup."